The long but extremely interesting judgement delivered yesterday morning by his Honour Judge Skinner Turner will be read by all landowners and, it may be, by not a few tenants, who, expecting to occupy their houses for some time, would like to keep the amenities of their dwelling unimpaired. The) question at issue was whether an owner of a picea of land may build right up to the boundary where no building has been before, in such wise as to exclude light and air from a long-existing house on an adjacent plot. And the learned judge decided that there was nothing to stop him from doing so. The reasons by which he arrived at this conclusion must be read in the judgement, but it is interesting to note that one of his chief arguments was a judgement by Mr. Meadows, H.B.M. Consul at New-' chwang, in 1868. We should not presume to argue with his Honour on a matter of law, but we heartily wish he could have read that law differently. Moreover, the fact of the novel conditions in life Shanghai, to which the Judge himself referred, might suggest that too much importance ought not to be attached to a judgement given in such very different times as the year 1858. There are plenty of old statutes in England if not judgements, which are dead letters now simply because times have changed One of the crying needs of Shanghai to-day is control over what a landowner may do with his land, and from the standpoint of public interest the judgement is much to be regretted.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.